Bitcoin mining is not a guarantee of profit, only a guarantee of income. People buying mining equipment are exactly like investors buying stock in a company, speculating that they will make more money than they spent. You could have bought a bond (no real comparision, but could substitute BTC here) instead, and had a fair guarantee of income. You could also have just kept mining with whatever equipment you had until electricity costs made it no longer worthwhile and definitely had profit.
missed the nail on this one. we are talking about hardware vendors here - not the 'industry' as a whole. we are not investors in any BTC hardware company when we order hardware. if we were we would have equity stakes and privileges associated with that. in this context the only thing that should be guaranteed (by laws and regs) is that a hardware product purchased by a customer is delivered as advertised (including the time frame). if customers are not receiving the products they should be in, the time that they should, then these forums are one of several means of recourse for customers to use against fraudulent, incompetent, or otherwise non-performing hardware vendors.